Kristina Ohlsson

Kristina Ohlsson is a political scientist and until recently held the position of Counter-Terrorism Officer at OSCE (the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe).

She has previously worked at the Swedish Security Service, the Ministry for Foreign Affairs and the Swedish National Defense College, where she was a junior expert on the Middle East conflict and the foreign policy of the European Union. Kristina lives in Stockholm.

Her series featuring Fredrika Bergman begins with Askungar (Unwanted).

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Håkan Nesser

Håkan Nesser (born 21 February 1950 in Kumla, Närke) is a Swedish author and teacher who has written a number of successful novels, mostly crime fiction. He has won Best Swedish Crime Novel Award three times, and his novel Carambole won the Glass Key award in 2000. His books have been translated from Swedish into numerous languages.

A recurring main character is called Van Veeteren, a detective in the early novels and later the owner of an antique books shop. These books play out in a fictitious city called Maardam, said to be located in northern Europe in a country which is never named but resembles Sweden, the Netherlands, Poland and Germany. The names however are mostly Dutch.

With his 2006 crime novel Människa utan hund (Human without Dog) Nesser introduced a new main character, Inspector Gunnar Barbarotti, a Swedish police inspector of Italian descent. He has remained the main protagonist in Nesser’s crime books since then. Barbarotti is a more upbeat character than Van Veeteren and the books are firmly set in Sweden, although the town of Kymlinge is fictitious and named after an "abandoned tube station" in Stockholm.

Nesser explained in an 2009 interview that he has two books left in him with Inspector Barbarotti, a novel set in London and a final masterpiece. In August 2011 he hinted on his own site that a future book would take place in the "county of Somerset".

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Liza Marklund

Eva Elisabeth "Liza" Marklund (born 9 September 1962) is a Swedish journalist and crime writer. She was born in Pålmark near Piteå, Norrbotten. Her novels, most of which feature the fictional character Annika Bengtzon, a newspaper journalist, have been published in thirty languages.

Marklund is the co-owner of Sweden's third largest publishing house, Piratförlaget and a columnist in the Swedish tabloid Expressen. She is also a Unicef ambassador.

The Postcard Killers, a crime thriller written in collaboration with American bestselling author James Patterson, is Marklund's twelfth book. It was published on January 27, 2010, in Sweden, and became number one on the Swedish bestseller list in February 2010. It was published on 16 August 2010 in the United States. At the end of August, it reached number one in the New York Times best-seller list, making Liza Marklund the second Swedish author (the first one being Stieg Larsson with the Millennium Trilogy) ever to reach the number one spot. Marklund lives in Spain with her husband Mikael.

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Henning Mankell

Henning Mankell (born 3 February 1948) is a Swedish crime writer, children's author, leftist activist and dramatist, best known for a series of mystery novels starring his most famous creation, Inspector Kurt Wallander.

Mankell was born in Stockholm, Sweden in 1948. His parents divorced when he was one year old, and for a majority of his childhood lived with his father, Ivar, and an older sister. The three lived first in Sveg (Härjedalen), where his father was a district judge, and later, Borås (Västergötland). Mankell's grandfather, also named Henning Mankell (1868–1930), was a composer. At the age of 20 he had already started a career as author and assistant director at the Riksteater in Stockholm. In the following years he collaborated with several theatres in Sweden.

In his youth Mankell was a left-wing political activist and a strong opponent of the Vietnam War, South African apartheid and Portugal's colonial war in Mozambique. In the 1970s Mankell moved from Sweden to Norway and lived with a Norwegian woman who was a member of the Maoist Communist Labour Party of Norway. Mankell took part in the party's activities but did not join the party.

After living in Zambia and other African countries, Mankell was invited to become the artistic director of Teatro Avenida in Maputo, the capital of Mozambique. He now spends at least half the year in Maputo working with the theatre and writing. Recently he built up his own publishing house (Leopard Förlag) in order to support young talents from Africa and Sweden.

He is married to Eva Bergman, daughter of Ingmar Bergman. On 12 June 2008 he was awarded an honorary Doctorate from the University of St Andrews in Scotland.

Mankell developed two original stories for the German police series Tatort. Actor Axel Milberg, who portrays Inspector Klaus Borowski, had asked Mankell to contribute to the show as the two were promoting The Chinaman audio book, a project that Milberg had worked on. The episodes will be broadcast in Germany in 2010.

Mankell is set to work on a screenplay for Sveriges Television about his father-in-law, the famous movie and theatre director Ingmar Bergman during 2010 and the series will be produced in four one-hour episodes. Production is planned for 2011. Mankell pitched the project to Sveriges Television and will include international co-producers/financiers.

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Kurt Wallander is a fictional police inspector living and working in Ystad, Sweden. In the novels, he solves shocking murders with his colleagues. The novels have an underlying question: "What went wrong with Swedish society?" The series has won many awards, including the German Crime Prize and the British 2001 CWA Gold Dagger for Sidetracked. The ninth book, The Pyramid, is a prequel: a collection of five novellas (Wallander's First Case, The Man with the Mask, The Man on the Beach, The Death of the Photographer, The Pyramid) about Wallander's past, with the last one ending just before the start of Faceless Killers. Ten years after The Pyramid, Mankell published another Wallander novel, The Troubled Man, which he said would definitely be the last in the series.

Eva-Marie Liffner

Eva-Marie Liffner (born 1957 in Gothenburg) is a Swedish author.

Two of her novels have been translated into English.

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Stieg Larsson

Karl Stig-Erland "Stieg" Larsson (15 August 1954 – 9 November 2004) was a Swedish journalist and writer. He is best known for writing the "Millennium series" of crime novels, which were published posthumously. Larsson lived and worked much of his life in Stockholm, in the field of journalism and as an independent researcher of right-wing extremism.

He was the second best-selling author in the world for 2008, behind Khaled Hosseini. By December 2011, his "Millennium series" had sold 65 million copies; its last part, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest, became the most sold book in the United States in 2010 according to Publishers Weekly.

Soon after Larsson's death, the manuscripts of three completed, but unpublished, novels – written as a series – were discovered. He had written them for his own pleasure after returning home from his job in the evening, and had made no attempt to get them published until shortly before his death. The first was published in Sweden in 2005 as Swedish: Män som hatar kvinnor – literally – Men who hate women. It was titled for the English-language market as The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and published in the United Kingdom in February 2008. It was awarded the Glass Key award as the best Nordic crime novel in 2005. His second novel, Flickan som lekte med elden (The Girl Who Played with Fire), received the Best Swedish Crime Novel Award in 2006, and was published in the United Kingdom in January 2009. The third novel in the Millennium series, Luftslottet som sprängdes ("The air castle that was blown up"), published in English as The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest, was published in the United Kingdom in October 2009, and the United States in May 2010.

Larsson left about three quarters of a fourth novel on a notebook computer, now possessed by his partner, Eva Gabrielsson: synopses or manuscripts of the fifth and sixth in the series, which he intended to contain an eventual total of ten books, may also exist. Gabrielsson has stated in her book, "There Are Things I Want You to Know" About Stieg Larsson and Me (2011) that finishing the book is a task that she is capable of doing.

The Swedish film production company Yellow Bird has produced film versions of the Millennium series, co-produced with the Danish film production company Nordisk Film, which were released in Scandinavia in 2009.

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Through his written works, as well as in interviews, Larsson acknowledged that a significant number of his literary influences were American and British crime/detective fiction authors. His heroine has some similarities with Carol O'Connell's "Mallory," who first appeared in Mallory's Oracle in 1994. In his work he made a habit of inserting the names of some of his favourites within the text, sometimes by making his characters read the works of his own favorite authors. Topping the list were Sara Paretsky, Agatha Christie, Val McDermid, Dorothy Sayers, Elizabeth George and Enid Blyton.

One of the strongest influences originates from his own country: Pippi Longstocking, by Sweden's much-loved children's author Astrid Lindgren. Larsson explained that one of his main recurring characters in the Millennium series, Lisbeth Salander, is actually fashioned on a grown-up Pippi Longstocking as he chose to sketch her.[24] There are additional connections to her literary work in the Larsson novels; for example, the other main character, Mikael Blomkvist is frequently referred to mockingly by his detractors as "Kalle Blomkvist", the name of a fictional teenage detective created by Lindgren.

When Larsson was 15 years old, he witnessed three of his friends gang-raping a young girl, which led to his lifelong abhorrence of violence and abuse against women. His longtime partner, Eva Gabrielsson, writes that this incident "marked him for life" in a chapter of her book that describes Larsson as a feminist. The author never forgave himself for failing to help the girl, and this inspired the themes of sexual violence against women in his books.

According to Gabrielsson, the Millennium trilogy allowed Larsson to express a worldview he was never able to elucidate as a journalist. She described, with a great deal of specificity, how the fundamental narratives of his three books were essentially fictionalized portraits of the Sweden few people knew, a place where latent white supremacy found expression in all aspects of contemporary life, and anti­-extremists lived in persistent fear of attack. “Everything of this nature described in the Millennium trilogy has happened at one time or another to a Swedish citizen, journalist, politician, public prosecutor, unionist or policeman,” she writes. “Nothing was made up.”

There are also similarities between Larsson's Lisbeth Salander and Peter O'Donnell's Modesty Blaise. Both are women from disastrous childhoods who somehow survive to become adults with notable skills, including fighting, and who accomplish good by operating somewhat outside the law. One of Larsson's villains, Ronald Niedermann (a.k.a. "blond hulk"), has much in common with the invulnerable, sociopathic giant named Simon Delicata in the fourth Modesty Blaise book A Taste for Death.

Åsa Larsson

Åsa Larsson (born 28 June 1966 in Uppsala) is a Swedish crime-writer.

Although born in Uppsala, she was raised in Kiruna in the far north. Prior to becoming a full-time writer, Larsson was a tax lawyer, a profession she shares with the heroine of her novels, Rebecka Martinsson.

Her first novel published in the UK (under the title The Savage Altar), was shortlisted for the Duncan Lawrie International Dagger. Her second novel, Det blod som spillts, won the Best Swedish Crime Novel Award. The 2007 Swedish film Solstorm was based on the book The Savage Altar.

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Jens Lapidus

Jens Lapidus (born 1974) is a Swedish criminal defense lawyer and author, who made his writing debut in August 2006 with Snabba Cash, an account of the Stockholm underworld, and the first of the Stockholm Noir trilogy. Two years later the second installment, Aldrig Fucka Upp was published by Wahlström & Widstrand.

A graphic novel with illustrator Peter Bergting (The Portent) entitled Gängkrig 145 was published May 2009. While this project does tie into his previous novels, it is not the third part of the Stockholm Noir trilogy as some Swedish media has claimed. The third part was published in 2011 with the title Livet deluxe. His writing has been compared to James Ellroy and Dennis Lehane. Jens Lapidus lives in Stockholm with his wife, daughter and son.

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Dagmar Lange / Maria Lang

Dagmar Lange (31 March 1914, Västerås – 9 October 1991) was a Swedish author of crime fiction under the pen name Maria Lang. She was one of the first detective novelists in the Swedish language, and her books helped make the genre popular in Sweden. Her first novel, Mördaren ljuger inte ensam, was published in 1949 and caused some controversy because two of the main characters lived in a homosexual relationship. The book was given a positive review by Barbro Alving in Dagens Nyheter.

Lange wrote more than 40 detective novels, as well as crime fiction for young adults. Most of her books are set in the fictional Swedish town Skoga, which is based on Lange's home town Nora. She was one of the original 13 members of the Swedish Crime Writers' Academy when it was founded in 1971.

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Camilla Läckberg

Jean Edith Camilla Läckberg Eriksson (August 30, 1974 in Fjällbacka, Bohuslän) is a Swedish crime writer. She has been translated into 33 languages.

Läckberg considers herself a crime dilettante since discovering such literature on her father's bookshelf at a tender age this has remained her reading fascination. Läckberg's books have received special praise for detail and "in-depth characterization". Those around are observed for behaviour, then the protagonist is hidden in a plethora of characters-although the readers are never deceived per se.

What interests is primarily psychology:-just how 'horrible' people are capable of being! Läckberg - sometimes called the Swedish Agatha Christie - became a writer after her husband and parents enrolled her in a creative writing course as a Christmas present: 'For me actually, specific images – snapshots – come first, and then the story starts to come together from those bits and pieces. I am very visual when I write, I "see" the story in pictures and writing a book is like having a movie running in my head 24/7.' The scenes are described in a few words which gives the reader a simple pattern to work from-they have to provide the rest:- "I read about fur­ni­ture mak­ers I’ve never heard about, design­ers I can­not pro­nounce, and mag­a­zines which seem inter­est­ing enough to look through. Need­less to say Google's search-engine works over­time dur­ing my research!"

Although her actual creative process is shrouded in mystery some suggest Läckberg first looks for a motive then works from there; these-as her plots-she terms 'finite' attributions: money, jealousy, revenge, loss etc. 'Understanding why someone does something terrible like a murder is interesting.' The characters are definitely the strong point: they are complicated people who are far from perfect, their innermost workings are interesting, often amusing, having a patina of realism. At the end of each book is a 'imaginary peripeteia' as in ancient Greek drama, a reversal showing everything from a new perspective.

Läckberg often uses a familiar narrative ploy of running two stories alongside one another (In the Stone Cutter the current murder investigation and the story of Anders Andersson, a stone cutter from Stromstad in 1923. In the Hidden Child the assassination of a retired history teacher juxtaposed against Erika's mothers wartime diaries). Although the protagonist is sometimes known before the finish thus avoiding a cliched denouement at the end-the writing is skillful enough to still demand our attention.

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Hans Koppel

Hans Koppel is a pseudonym for an established children's book author Petter Lidbeck who was born in 1964 and lives in Stockholm.

After writing over twenty books for children, he published an adult thriller in 2008, not revealing his identity until two years later. He continues to publish for children while publishing four crime novels between 2008 and 2011.

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Lars Kepler

Lars Kepler is a Swedish author pseudonym , used by Alexander Ahndoril and Alexandra Coelho Ahndoril when writing crime novels about Inspector Joona Linna.

Kepler's first work, Dick Hypnotist has been sold to 38 different language areas and in September 2009 it reached sales lists first place in Sweden. Paganini Contract , the second crime novel in the series, reached exactly one year after the debut even the försäljningstoppens first place. Then, when the third book, Eldvittnet , also took first place and so the fourth book, Sand Man , topped December's bestseller list in 2012 as Lars Kepler has been number one for four consecutive years with the first four books.

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Theodor Kallifatides

Theodor Kallifatides (born 1938) is a Greek writer. He is a Greek immigrant to Sweden, but writes in Swedish.

Kallifatides was born in the village Molaoi, in Laconia, Greece in 1938. His father was Dimitrios Kallifatides, a teacher originated from Pontus and his mother was Antonia Kyriazakou from Molaoi. In 1946 he and his family moved to Athens where he finished high school and studied in the Karolos Koun's theatrical school.

He emigrated to Sweden in 1964 and has lived in the country ever since. He studied philosophy, and has worked as a lecturer at Stockholm University between 1969 and 1972 and then as chief of Bonniers literary magazine between 1972 and 1976. Kallifatides made his literary debut in 1969 with a poetry book, but gained recognition mainly through his subsequently published novels. He has published novels, poetry collections, travel essays and plays. He has written film scripts and has directed a film.

Kallifatides has received numerous awards for his works which usually revolve around his experience of Greece and of being Greek in foreign domains, and almost all his works have been translated and published in more than twenty languages.

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Mons Kallentoft

Mons Kallentoft (born 15 April 1968), is a Swedish author and journalist. Kallentoft grew up in Ljungsbro outside Linköping and lives in Stockholm. He has written five books about Police Inspector Malin Fors. The series is translated in 28 countries.

 His book Midvinterblod was published as Midwinter Sacrifice in the UK and Australia by Hodder & Stoughton in October 2011, and as Midwinter Blood in US and Canada by Simon & Schuster in June 2012.

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Mari Jungstedt

Mari Jungstedt (born 31 October 1962 in Stockholm) is a Swedish journalist and popular crime fiction author.

Jungstedt worked as a reporter on Swedish national public radio and television, and was an occasional presenter on TV4's daily talk show Förkväll.

Her first five novels are set on the island of Gotland and feature Detective Superintendent Anders Knutas and the journalist Johan Berg. Two of her novels were filmed for Swedish TV, and her work has been translated into English by Tiina Nunnally. In 2012, her book "The Dead of Summer" was released in America by the publishing house Stockholm Text.

Mari Jungstedt lives in Stockholm. Her husband comes from Visby, Gotland, and they spend their summers on Gotland.

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Anna Jansson

Anna Maria Angelika Jansson (born 13 February 1958) is a Swedish crime writer and nurse from Visby, Gotland. She started her career as a surgeon nurse, but soon went over to the lung clinic due to her frequent fainting from seeing blood.

Jansson began writing novels in 1997 after her family bought a computer. At this time she had worked as a nurse for twenty years, and although she still enjoyed her occupation, she felt it was time to try something new. Jansson commented: "In school I hated writing essays, but then we got a computer at home, and suddenly I discovered that I actually felt happy as I was writing." A contributing factor to Jansson's decision to pursue her career as an author was her patients; she often met patients that were about to die and she was told that they regretted the fact that they had not spent much time in life doing what they really wanted.

The inspiration for Jansson's novels, which deal with crimes, came from the patients she met in her job as a nurse. Jansson's first crime novel to be published was Stum sitter guden in 2000. She had written two novels prior to this one, but failed to find a publisher for them. Jansson did not give up on her career as a nurse, and continued to work part-time at the Örebro Hospital while writing in her free time. Since 2000, she has published at least one novel each year. Her latest ones have sold over 100,000 copies each. In addition to this, Jansson has written a number of children's books.

Jansson's crime novels take place in Gotland and the main character in all of them is criminal inspector Maria Wern. Her 2006 novel Främmande fågel was nominated for a Glass Key award in 2007, and was adapted into a television show by TV4 in 2008.

Despite her now successful career as a writer, Jansson still works part-time as a nurse at Örebro Hospital's lung clinic. She has three children and lives in Vintrosa outside of Örebro.

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Michael Hjorth & Hans Rosenfeldt

Authors of a series made into a popular television drama concerning a washed-up criminal psychologist who gets caught up in a small-town investigation when he settles his deceased mother's affairs.

Hjorth was born in 1963 in Visby and has worked in television and film, as a writer and producer, and has developed advertising for ICA, a major retail chain. Rosenfeldt, born in Boras in 1964, has also written for television and is a host for numerous television and radio programs.

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Roslund / Hellström

Roslund / Hellström is a Swedish crime writing duo composed of journalist Anders Roslund, born 1961, and Börge Hellström, born 1957, a famous debater on the Swedish correctional system. For the past ten years, Roslund has worked as a news reporter, culture journalist and news chief for Rapport News. Hellström is an ex-con and one of the founders of Kriminellas Revansch i Samhället (KRIS), an organisation fighting to prevent crime.

The duo made their debut with the crime novel Odjuret (English translation: The Beast) in 2004. A recurring theme in their novels is the question of who is the real victim and who the criminal when a crime has been committed.

Their works have been translated into other Nordic languages, Croatian, German, English, Russian and Turkish.

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Jan Guillou

Jan Oskar Sverre Lucien Henri Guillou (born 17 January 1944) is a Swedish author and journalist. Among his books are a series of spy fiction novels about a spy named Carl Hamilton, and a trilogy of historical fiction novels about a Knight Templar, Arn Magnusson. He is the owner of one of the largest publishing companies in Sweden, Piratförlaget (Pirate Publishing), together with Liza Marklund and his wife, publisher Ann-Marie Skarp.

Guillou's fame in Sweden was established during his time as an investigative journalist. In 1973, he and co-reporter Peter Bratt exposed a secret intelligence organization in Sweden, Informationsbyrån (IB). He is still active within journalism as a column writer for the Swedish evening tabloid Aftonbladet.

In October 2009, the tabloid Expressen accused Guillou of having been active as an agent of the Soviet spy organization KGB between 1967 and 1972. Jan Guillou confirmed he had a series of contacts with KGB representatives during this period, he also admits to having received payments from KGB, but maintains that his purpose was to collect information for his journalistic work. The accusation was based on documents released from the Swedish Security Service (Säpo) and interviews with former KGB Colonel Oleg Gordievsky. In a later trial, Expressen denied having accused Guillou of having been a Soviet spy, claiming that this was a false interpretation of its headlines and reporting.

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Camilla Grebe & Traff

Camilla Grebe, born in 1968, trained as an economist and co-founded Storyside, an audiobook publishing company.

She is the author of a series featuring a psychologist with co-author Traff, who (lke their protagonist) shares a private practice in cognitive behavioral therapy with two partners.

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